How Obama Is Robbing The Suburbs To Pay For The Cities

Political experts left and right agree: the coming election will be decided by America’s suburbanites. From Florida to Virginia on across the country, in every battleground state, they are the key demographic. All of which raises a question that has not been considered as yet, and ought to be: is President Obama’s re-election in the suburbanites’ interest? The answer emphatically is no.

As many Americans do not know, in the eyes of the leftist community organizers who trained Obama, suburbs are instruments of bigotry and greed — a way of selfishly refusing to share tax money with the urban poor. Obama adopted this view early on, and he has never wavered from this ideological commitment, as a review of his actions in office goes to show.

President Obama’s plans for a second-term include an initiative to systematically redistribute the wealth of America’s suburbs to the cities. It’s a transformative idea, and deserves to be fully aired before the election. But like a lot of his major progressive policy innovations, Obama has advanced this one stealthily–mostly through rule-making, appointment, and vague directives. Obama has worked on this project in collaboration with Mike Kruglik, one of his original community organizing mentors. Kruglik’s new group, Building One America, advocates “regional tax-base sharing,” a practice by which suburban tax money is directly redistributed to nearby cities and less-well-off “inner-ring” suburbs. Kruglik’s group also favors a raft of policies designed to coerce people out of their cars and force suburbanites (with their tax money) back into densely packed cities.

Obama has lent the full weight of his White House to Kruglik’s efforts. A federal program called the Sustainable Communities Initiative, for example, has salted planning commissions across the country with “regional equity” and “smart growth” as goals. These are, of course, code words. “Regional equity” means that, by their mere existence, suburbs cheat the people who live in cities. It means, “Let’s spread the suburbs’ wealth around” – i.e., take from the suburbanites to give to the urban poor. “Smart growth” means, “Quit building sub-divisions and malls, and move back to where mass transit can shuttle you between your 800 square foot apartment in an urban tower and your downtown job.” In all likelihood, these planning commissions will issue “recommendations” which Obama would quickly turn into requirements for further federal aid. In fact, his administration has already used these tactics to impose federal education requirements on reluctant states. Indeed, part of Obama’s assault on the suburbs is his effort to undercut the autonomy of suburban school districts.

Suburbs are for sellouts: That is a large and overlooked theme of Obama’s famous memoir, Dreams from My Father. Few have noticed the little digs at suburban “sprawl” throughout the book, as when Obama decries a Waikiki jammed with “subdivisions marching relentlessly into every fold of green hill.” Dreams actually begins with the tale of an African American couple who’ve come to question their move from city to suburb – the implication clearly being that the city is the moral choice.

Early on in Dreams, Obama tells of how his mother and Indonesian step-father, Lolo Soetoro, were pulled apart by a proxy version of the American dream. Lolo got a job with an American oil company, bought a house in a better neighborhood, and started dining at the company club. Obama’s mother, who had come to Indonesia in search of Third World authenticity, wanted nothing to do with the “ugly American” types who frequented this new world, and she taught her son to disdain them as well. From Obama’s perspective, American-inspired upward mobility had broken his new family in two.

Back in Hawaii after his Indonesian interlude, Obama came to see his grandparents as strangers. The realization dawned as they drove him along a sprawl-filled highway. Obama then threw in his lot with an African-American mentor named Frank Marshall Davis, who lived in a ramshackle pocket of the city called the “Waikiki Jungle” where his home was a gathering place for young leftists and nonconformists. Rejecting assimilation into America’s middle-class, Davis hit on socialist politics and identification with the urban poor as the way to establish his racial credentials.

Dreams from My Father describes Davis’s efforts to pass this stance on to Obama. At Occidental, with Davis’s advice in mind, Obama worried that he was too much like “suburban blacks, students who sit with whites in the cafeteria and refuse to be defined by the color of their skin.” This fear of becoming a middle-class suburban “sellout” is the background to the famous passage of Dreams where Obama explains why he started hanging out with “Marxist professors” and other unconventional types. Recalling Davis’s admonition to reject the standard path to success, “the American way and all that shit,” Obama left Occidental’s suburban campus for Columbia University, “in the heart of a true city.”

After leaving New York for Chicago, Obama met up with the Reverend Jeremiah Wright. This relationship, too, reflected Obama’s ideological disdain for the suburbs. Obama was distressed, for example, to learn that one of Wright’s assistants planned to move to a suburb for her son’s safety. After confronting Wright with concerns that his congregation was “too upwardly mobile,” Obama was mollified to discover the congregation’s official “Disavowal of the Pursuit of Middleclassness.” The years with Rev. Wright helped Obama solidify the solution to his identity crisis that Frank Marshall Davis had taught him long before: reject the lure of the middle-class suburbia and identify instead with the urban poor.

Post Your Comment

Post Your Reply

Forbes writers have the ability to call out member comments they find particularly interesting. Called-out comments are highlighted across the Forbes network. You'll be notified if your comment is called out.

There’s a disturbing trend I’m noticing…liberals hate it when conservatives express their opinions. Everyone is entitled to free speech – unless, of course you’re saying something the liberals don’t like. So I’m being told what to say, what to eat (thanks to Michelle Obama) and now where I should live. If I decide to have a conservative viewpoint, eat at McDonalds and live in the suburbs I’ll be shut down with insults. This country is being polarized by President Obama.

This is just plain BS. Sorry, the suburbs are not supporting the cities because of any special Obama agenda or policy. The only reason the suburbs support the city is because everyone with money moved to the damn suburbs. Whether for good reason or not, that is the truth. What do you expect to happen. In other news, the Parents support the children, and the workers support the elderly. Are those Obama conspiracies too?

Guess what, the suburbs wouldn’t even exist without the city. So what the f is the point of this article?

This column is a piece of trash. If you look at income distributions and taxation, it is BY FAR the urban centers, with their concentrations of high-paying jobs, businesses, restaurants and bars and theaters and shopping that collect the larger share of taxes.

Blue America, and places like NYC, Boston, Philly, LA, and other large metropolitan areas have been paying the bills for America for a long time. Red America, places like MS, AL, GA, OK and others have been net WELFARE states for years.

The entire premise of this article is flawed, and deeply offensive. When you say “Rob”, it throws already stupid suburbanites, Conservatives, and GOP folk into a frenzy. It does sell papers and collect page views, though, Kurtz. Kudos for your cynical use of red meat here.

What a idiotic post. I like how you pick the richest blue states and the poorest red states to compare. Typcial ignorant Democrat. Here’s a fact for you, for every $1 in federal taxes coming from California, they get $1.75 back. Why? Freeloading Medicaid recipients for the most part. Cities are anachronistic ideas that need to die. They are rife with crime, terrible for the environment, require massive resources to support and most importantly are completely unnecessary in the age of telecommuting.

The grift of redistributing suburban tax dollars to urban areas seems to be predicating federal tax dollars on said redistribution. So why not just send means-tested federal tax dollars to urban areas? Who’s the middleman – state governments? How do they get their mitts on county and municipal tax bases? I suppose Mr. Kurtz’s book answers these questions, so I suppose I’d better go get a copy.

The whole reason for suburban flight (notice how I don’t use the term white flight because minorities like Obama left the cities too) is because law enforcement and more importantly, politicians failed to preserve law and order in the cities. Crime and the utter failure to deal with it more than other reason drove the haves out of the inner cities. It just so happens that the political will to deal with crime seemed to evaporate at about the same time the civil rights movement gained traction in the late 60s. Coincidence? Look at the whole Zimmerman situation as a modern example of how law abiding citizens are now being “disarmed” in the name of civil rights. If someone white now has no choice but to kill a black assailant, the police will now be predisposed to blame the person defending themselves.

Quit with the racist nonsense. We will never have equality if black and whites and everyone else can’t keep what they earn! This is all a part of a “New World Order” and what is usually referred to as Agenda 21. The idea is to put all us worker ants in stacked up cities and reserve the country side for mother nature and those leaders who deserve access to it. Google it and try to wade through the gibberish, just because there are some nuts out there doesn’t mean there isn’t a problem, and folks if we don’t stop this we WILL have a problem.

You do realize that most parts of the world redistribute wealth right? States move wealth from richer areas to poorer areas. Countries do this between their states/provinces/counties. It changes the game, but it does provide benefit.

You are also ignoring the re-urbanization of America. People are moving to the cities. That is where the future tax base will be (if they ever all get jobS)